25. Josie
Josie
The door clicks shut behind him and my little blue house has never been this small.
Finn Morrow is standing in my entryway. Finn Morrow is standing in my entryway at nine on a Monday night, filling it, an alpha in a space built for one omega and a lot of throw pillows, woodsmoke and clove rolling off him and mixing with the warm sugar mess my own scent has become, and neither of us has turned on a light.
“So,” I say, because apparently that's the entire vocabulary I've got left. “This is the house. That's a lamp. There's a kitchen somewhere, historically.”
“Josie.”
“I'm nervous,” I tell him, because I can't lie, and it comes out small and honest. “You're in my house and I used up all my cool in the truck.”
“You weren't cool in the truck.”
“I was extremely cool in the truck.”
He steps in close, slow, telegraphing it, the way he does everything, like I'm something that might spook. One hand comes up and cradles my jaw, tips my face up, and his thumb drags along my cheekbone where I know the flush is sitting.
“You're burning up,” he says, quiet.
“It's June.”
“Josie.”
“Don't.” My hand closes in his shirt. Second time tonight. It's becoming a habit, holding onto this man by the fabric. “Don't be careful. If you're careful I'm going to lose my nerve, and I have wanted this since a closet full of construction paper, so.”
Something moves through him at that. His whole body, one long slow wave of it.
Then he kisses me, and there's nothing careful anywhere in it.
It's not the reunion kiss and it's not the driveway kiss. Those had endings built into them. This one doesn't.
This one has hands in it, his hand leaving my jaw and finding my waist and pulling me in until there's no polite gap left, and the low pull that's been rolling through me all day surges up hard enough that the sound I make into his mouth is frankly embarrassing.
He swallows it. Makes one of his own, low, rough, half a growl, and the last cool thought I have is that Finn Morrow makes noises after all.
“Bedroom,” I manage, against his mouth. “Unless you have strong feelings about the couch, in which case I need to move some laundry.”
“Bedroom.”
“End of the hall. If you hit the bathroom you've gone too far, the place is four rooms, I don't know why I'm giving you a tour.”
“Josie.” His forehead drops to mine. In the dark his eyes are all pupil. “Stop talking.”
“Make me,” I say, and he does.
He walks me backward down my own hallway like a man who's memorized it, mouth on mine every step, and we hit the bedroom doorframe once, my fault, and the bed second, his.
My room is small and my bed isn't and I have exactly one second to be grateful past-Josie splurged on the good quilt before he lays me down on it and follows me and every thought I own goes quiet at once.
Nobody's ever managed that. A lifetime of a brain like a browser with forty tabs open, and Finn Morrow puts his weight over me and it all just closes.
He kisses my jaw. My throat. Finds the scent spot below my ear where my pulse is going like a rabbit and stays there until my hips lift off the bed on their own, asking for something I refuse to say out loud.
“Shirt,” I say instead.
“Mine or yours.”
“Yes.”
Both. His comes off over his head in that one-armed way that should be illegal, and mine takes longer because his hands slide up under it first, slow, palms flat and rough and huge against my ribs, and by the time the shirt actually leaves my body I'm shaking and he's noticed.
He notices everything. I knew that. I knew that about him and I still wasn't ready to be what he aims it at, undivided.
“Cold?” he asks, knowing full well.
“Shut up.”
“You're shaking.”
“I'm aware. It's your fault. Take responsibility.”
He takes responsibility.
He takes it slow, mouth moving down my sternum while his hands go to the waistband of my shorts. He looks up at me, a question in it, one thumb hooked in the elastic, and I lift my hips off the bed to answer before he can even ask.
He draws them down my legs along with everything underneath, unhurried, dragging his knuckles back up the inside of my thighs on the return like he's mapping me, and then the last of my clothes hits the floor and I'm bare in front of Finn Morrow and he pulls back and looks at me for so long I start to squirm.
“Say something,” I whisper.
“No.”
“Finn.”
“There isn't a word.” He says it flat, final, fact-of-the-world, the way he says four-word things that rearrange me. Then he lowers his head and stops using words entirely.
His mouth lands on the inside of my knee. Travels up. Unhurried, thorough, like the man reorganizes garages, and by the time he settles between my thighs I'm fisting the sheets and past caring about anything.
He looks at me from down there, at how slick I am, how swollen, how far past ready, and something in his face goes dark and reverent at once.
“Been thinking about this,” he says, to my skin. “Since April.”
Then his mouth is on me and the first long pass of his tongue through my slick pulls a sound out of me I have never made in my life.
He does it again. Slower. Spreads me open with his thumbs and takes his time about it, licking into me like the flavor of me is the entire point.
When he closes his lips around my clit and sucks, my hips come off the bed. His forearm pins them right back down.
“Finn—”
He hums against my clit, pleased, merciless, and sets a rhythm that has clearly been planned, because everything about this man is deliberate. The flat of his tongue, long and slow. The point of it, quick, right where I need it.
One thick finger eases inside me right when the ache goes from want to need, curling forward, finding the spot that whites out my vision. Then a second, stretching me, slick sounds filling my quiet bedroom, obscene and unbearable.
“So slick for me,” he says, rough, against my clit, and the words alone nearly finish it. “Dripping. You going to come on my mouth, Josie?”
“Yes... fuck, yes, don't stop...”
“Wasn't going to.”
My body, already running hot for days, already three steps ahead of every plan I own, does not stand a chance.
I break apart in about ninety seconds, embarrassingly, spectacularly, grinding against his mouth with my heel in his shoulder blade, slick gushing over his fingers, his name coming out of me in pieces.
He works me through it, licking me soft and slow until the shaking eases, and presses one last kiss to the inside of my thigh like a signature.
“That was fast,” I gasp, at the ceiling. “That's not. I'm not usually. Your ego doesn't need this information.”
“Too late.” He's already moving up my body, jeans gone somewhere I didn't witness, and the smug is barely there, just a quarter-inch at the corner of his mouth. On Finn Morrow, a standing ovation.
Then he's above me, braced on one forearm, heavy and hot everywhere, and the teasing goes out of the room like a tide.
His cock is hard against my hip. He's shaking. Barely, finely, a tension running through him like a held load, and I realize the slow hasn't been patience.
It's been restraint. Alpha restraint, the kind with teeth behind it. All of it. All night. Maybe all month.
“Josie.” His voice is gravel. “Look at me.”
I look at him.
“Tell me,” he says.
“Yes.” I pull him down. “Yes, now, please.”
He notches the thick head of his cock against me and pushes in slow, and the stretch of him is a whole event. Thick and hot and endless, splitting me open inch by inch while my body, slick and swollen and days into wanting this, pulls him deeper like it's been waiting years to learn his shape.
“Fuck.” It punches out of him, low, wrecked. Finn Morrow, swearing in my bed. “Josie. You're...”
“I know. Keep going.”
He bottoms out, hips flush to mine, so deep I taste it, and we both stop breathing at the same time.
He holds still. Buried, forehead dropping to mine, one tremor running down his spine under my palms.
“Okay?” he grits.
“If you stop I'll murder you.”
“Noted.”
He moves.
Slow first, deep, deliberate, dragging against every oversensitive nerve my body's spent a week manufacturing. Pulling nearly all the way out and pushing back in, making me take every inch of it, watching my face while he does it.
“Look at me.” Low. An order. “Eyes on me, Josie.”
I look at him, and he drives in harder, and the bed I've slept in alone for five years picks up a rhythm it has never once heard, and I stop being a person with a plan and become a person with her nails in a fireman's back.
“There... Finn, right there, don't...”
“I've got you.” He shifts his angle a half-degree, deliberate as everything, and hits it again, and again, until I'm writhing. “Right there?”
“Yes...”
“Louder.”
It builds fast. Too fast, again, everything's too fast tonight.
My skin's too tight and too hot and every pass of him winds the coil higher, and my own voice reaches me from somewhere, breathless, wrecked, begging now, actually begging, please and more and his name, saying things with no plan in them at all.
And then I feel it.
At the base of him, where our bodies meet, a swelling. A pressure that catches at me on every stroke now, bigger each time, and my body knows what it is before my brain catches up and the want that rips through me is so total, so loud, that my hips slam up to chase it before I've decided anything.
His knot. That's his knot, swelling at the base of his cock, catching at my rim on every stroke now, bigger each time, and every cell I own is screaming for it.
My body clenches around him, greedy, trying to pull it in, slick easing the way like my biology has already voted.
“Finn... please, I need...” It comes out broken. Begging. I don't even know what I'm asking for, except I do, I absolutely do, and I can't ask for it, because there's a drawer in my nightstand and a plan in that drawer and a rule older than both of us about what a knot means.
“I know.” Through his teeth, every word costing him. “Fuck. I know. I feel you.”
I feel it too. What he wants. What we both want. To let it push in and seat and lock us together, the way my whole body is screaming for.
And he holds it back.
Not the swell, he can't stop that, it's building whether either of us wants it or not.
What he holds back is the last of it. He keeps himself right there, catching and tugging at my rim without ever letting it seat, without letting it push past and lock, some titanic effort that shudders through him, his breath tearing, his forearm shaking by my head.
He gives me the drag of it, the stretch, the catch, everything right up to the edge of what my body's begging for. Everything except that. The denial aches so sweet and hollow that it tips me over all on its own.
I come apart around him with a sound like a sob, clamping down so hard his rhythm stutters, and he follows me down.
Two strokes, three, and then he buries himself as deep as he can go without the knot and spills into me, hot and endless, coming with a sound I will be hearing for the rest of my life, low and broken and my name in the middle of it, his mouth landing open on the side of my throat.
Right there. Right where it would go.
His teeth rest against my skin. Not biting. Just resting, pressed to my pulse, his whole body locked around the instinct the way you hold a door against weather, and we stay like that, shaking, both of us, while the wave rolls through and past.
Then he turns his head, slow, and presses a kiss to the exact spot instead.
Soft. Deliberate. A signature on a line he didn't cross.
I stare at my dark ceiling and hold onto him and do not cry. The single largest achievement of my adult life.
He comes back from my bathroom with a washcloth and a glass of water, because he's Finn, and somewhere in the last hour I stopped being surprised by him and started being ruined instead.
He cleans me up with a care that should be clinical and isn't, and then he hands me the glass and watches me drink it, sitting on the edge of my bed, huge and rumpled and unhurried, like there's nowhere else a Monday could possibly end.
“You're watering me,” I say, into the glass.
“Somebody has to.”
“I had a system before you. I want that noted. A functioning life, start to finish.”
“Mm.” He takes the empty glass and sets it on the nightstand, right next to the drawer I am not thinking about, and then he looks at me in the dark for a long moment. “Move over.”
“You're staying?”
It comes out before I can dress it up. Naked. Hopeful. Three weeks of careful, gone.
Finn pulls back the covers and gets into my bed like the answer's too obvious to say, and hauls me into him, my back to his chest, one arm heavy over me.
His hand splays flat on my sternum. Right where I pressed mine at the stoplight, like whatever I've been holding up alone, he's got a hand on it now too.
That's that. That's the answer.
I lie there in the dark while his breathing slows, and my body hums, low and warm and unfinished, wanting what it didn't get. I should be terrified.
There's a plan two feet from my head in a drawer, and a man wrapped around me who isn't in it. My suppressants are failing. There's a name for what's happening to me, and I keep that in the drawer too.
And then it starts.
Low. Under my ear, through his chest, through the length of my back. A slow, deep, rolling rumble, completely involuntary, the sound an alpha makes only when everything in him is settled at once.
Finn Morrow is purring.
Finn Morrow is purring, wrapped around me in my bed, dead asleep, and I lie very still in the circle of him and let it move through my bones like weather.
There's a name for this, too.
I don't finish the thought. I've kept that streak alive for four weeks and two miles and one whole impossible Monday.
But lying here, in the dark, in the sound of him, for the first time I can't remember why.